Yes Mary, you are reading right. There are several softwares that allow you to download free or purchased designs from the internet to your computer. Then you transfer from computer to the 'cardwriting box/card' for using in your machine. The most popular is the Brother PED Basic that I mentioned above. It only writes .pes format, which is what the 270 uses, and can be bought...sometimes used, from ebay. Normally, you can find new there, as well as Walmart on line, Allbrands.com, and other sites. You may pay from $50to $100+. Then you can download a free software to change other design formats to .pes for your machine to use. There are many many free designs available and a good place to start is to join Sewforum.com. It is a forum for embroiderers, where you can ask questions, request someone create a design for you free or for fee. It is not very active now as the site is also on Facebook, but still, there are thousands of free designs still there. I hope I have explained-helped you. Good luck!

First of all the two machines take different formats. You might want to consider purchasing Embird that will convert the two formats so that you can use the same design with each machine sans the Disney designs that are propietary to Brother and can't be used on any other machine. You are correct that you will need a reader writer box for the Brother machine because your machines are different formats. The PED basic sounds like a good plan (available on line at Walmart for around $139.). I have two different brand machines and also found that the hoops are not interchangeable either. The only things that may be interchageable are feet and needles. The bobbins may be different so you really have to watch which bobbin you have and don't get them mixed up. I would thoroughly read the Brother manual before purchasing anything further...they are pretty good about documetation and educating if you practice the manual page by painful page.

For an 8mp camera, I finally got a 2gb card and shoot RAW, you don't need quite as large a card for JPG. Still, at events, I sometimes do shoot in JPG and was filling a 1gb card in 1/2 hour, the 2gb card filled up in about an hour doing some street shots and a parade in RAW. It's best to set the camera to the finest quality possible unless they are shots where you need a whole lot but the quality isn't critical. You can't ever get lost quality back on your important shots. Then there are the bigger cards. The reason I don't want to get into larger sizes is that if the card gets corrupted, you lose more photos, plus they are a lot more expensive. I have had good luck with my Kingston cards which were cheap and slower, now I have one Sandisk Ultra II, both seem to be pretty reliable. There was trouble with some brands. Those things are so tiny, it would be so easy to lose the extra ones. I need a better plan to try to avoid that. Be sure to order the right card for the cam. They either take CompactFlash or SD (or proprietary memory sticks), and it would be easy to make a mistake on that.

I really hate to try anything like that because it's not my camera....I'd hate it to ruin the camera too. I am going to leave well enough alone at this point! LOL.....My luck I'll end up buying her a new camera too! I just bought her a new card. She said not to, but I feel like it was I was the last person to touch the card, I should replace it. I was just happy to be able to recover her pictures she had in there. She keeps pictures in her camera forever and there was some as far back as Feb. in there. A lot of them were of Austin, his birthday party, Easter, etc. She doesn't have a cd burner on her computer so she can only save them on her camera or on the computer. I told her neither one are for safe keeping and she need to have them put onto cd's before she loses them all. Then this happens while was looking at her pictures! LOL...I am so happy to have recovered them for her, I was so afraid I lost them. There were a few of the last few days that I couldn't recover, but she said they are no big deal. She hasn't had the card out of the camera in a year because she uses the cables to transfer them to her computer. First time out and I'm the one who took it out...and it screws up! It figures!